Book Review

by

M. Lee Williams

Hyperion 2002

In The Company of Angels

by

N.M. Kelby
 

N. M. KELBY: INTIMATELY WHISPERS TO A NOISY WORLD

There are those who hear the voice of God in church bells, but in the roar of war they listen and hear only the silence of God. They are the ones who believe in miracles, yet wonder at the absence of God when a world is at war and all seems lost. In the danger that defines their struggles they dare to seek and find miracles In The Company Of Angels.

In N. M. Kelby's first novel we find a world where all obligations are delicate and no convictions are weak. She takes us on a journey from a small village in France near the Belgium border to a convent in Tournai, Belgium -- Tournai, cent clochers, quatre cents cloches/one hundred bell towers, four hundred bells. The journey continues past Tournai to a world of memories and legacies. We travel with a Mother Superior, a young postulate, and a child who is the only survivor of the small French village that was destroyed by the Nazis in a hurly burly flash of sound and light.

Nearly buried alive in the cellar of her grandmother's house, the child, Marie Claire, comes to experience the world as magical and mysterious. She hides from the Nazis after a voice whispers a warning. She is saved when a hand moves a rug over the cellar door to fool the Nazis. Hidden in the cellar, a dead man orchestrates for her a fiery puppet show deemed to be the "future." Beneath the rubble of war, below the dusty floors of what was her grandmother's house, covered by fistfuls of dirt, "love has become impossible. . .but Marie Claire can still feel it, scratching."

Two nuns, Sisters of His Divine and Most Sacred Blood, stumble through the stench and rubble to rescue Marie Claire. Sister Xavier has ties to the enemy: her parents are involved in genetic studies for the Third Reich. A woman Sister Xavier loved, a childhood friend, has been brutalized and drowned by a Commander in Hitler's army-a Commander on whom Sister Xavier visits revenge. Which of those ties is ordinary and which is extraordinary are matters defined by war and faith.

Sister Anne flees the memories of her mother's thorned and bloody sufferings for God, and her father's impotent promise to protect Anne from her mother who sees angels and swears she is beaten by them. Sister Anne cannot so easily flee the memories of a springtime love for a young street artist.

In time of war, a priest seeks the shoes and the chocolates of a dead man. In the darkness of war, there are questions. "Who is dead? Who is not? . . . how can you tell if one is truly dead?" In war, the world balances the horror of murder with miracles of life. When the nun, the postulate, and the orphan girl reach out to each other, the miracles begin. At first the miracles begin as merely the sound of wings flapping and the sweet smell of roses. Beneath the underbrush, along ledges, around a Star of David bruise, in a shaft of pure light--there is the smell of roses, always.

Reality shifts. What else can it do in the desperation of war and in the presence of miracles? "The dead walk," Kelby tells us, "the living rot away inch by inch. . .logic no longer applies." Saints and sinners are lost in the mysteries of life, but whether death finds them or not, they continue to hold to their faith in love. God, it was thought, had surely left the town of four hundred bells, yet He seems to have been amongst them all along. A young saint gently takes a sinner in her arms and reminds him "In His will is our peace." A lost child saves a lost child. And who isn't a lost child when collective urges to conquer and be thought brave overcome individual sanity? The child saved was an angel of God.

Kelby, a writer whose roots are in journalism, is more poet than journalist in this first novel. Her writing is lean, metaphorical, an intimate whisper that can quiet a noisy world. We feel the fear, recognize the need to forgive and be forgiven, and recoil from the cold heart that freezes the soul. We have a stake in the miracles, dreams and desires of her characters. In less than two hundred pages she writes threads that tangle and untangle. In a ray of light we see the unseeable, and in the darkness of pain we still see. Shimmering music, horns of white chocolate, fields of irises big as a man's fist, unbearable silence, the smell of Shalimar, gunshots from the top of a hill, a box of chocolates falling into the street, words spoken without breath, steam halos, ashes burning the tongue, the photographed smile of a proud father. We see, hear, smell, taste, feel and believe.



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Click HERE for bio of N.M. Kelby.

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M. Lee Williams lives in Iowa and writes of Mississippi.

She is published in Mississippi Review Online and Amarillo Bay. She has recently finished writing chapter eight of a novel about 1950s Mississippi. God willin' and the creeks don't rise, she will finish it before it finishes her.

You can reach M. Lee Williams at: daheditah@yahoo.com